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Wednesday, April 30, 2014

`His Pompous Art'

John
Wolcot (1738-1819) was an English physician, rector and deservedly forgotten
poet who specialized in satirizing writers whose gifts outshone his own, including
Dryden, Dr. Johnson and Boswell. Wolcot, using the pseudonym Peter Pindar, makes
fun of Johnson’s biographers in Bozzy and
Piozzi, or, The British Biographers, a Town Eclogue (1786). In 1813, in The Monthly Magazine, he published “On
the Style of Dr. Johnson”:

“I
own I like not Johnson’s turgid style,

Who
gives an inch th’ importance of a mile!

Uprears
the club of Hercules, for what?

To
crush a butterfly, or brain a gnat;

Creates
a whirlwind from the earth to draw

A
goose’s feather, or exalt a straw;

Sets
wheels on wheels in motion, such a clatter,

To
force up one poor nipperkin of water;

Bids
ocean labour with tremendous roar,

To
heave a cockle-shell upon the shore;

The
same on every theme his pompous art,

Heaven’s
awful thunder, or a rumbling cart!”

Satire
must be laser-guided to remain lethal beyond its day, and attempting to
satirize satirists is a risky business. Wolcot is more like a hooligan than a
satirist, a vandal with a can of spray paint. His spirit is anarchic and
utterly irreverent. He confuses loutish bad manners with satire, the goal of
which is, according to Dryden, “the amendment of Vices by correction.” Wolcot
has no interest in retooling the nation’s morals. The moral of the poem above is
simply stated: Johnson wielded big weapons against little targets. Each couplet
rewords the identical point, reiterating that Johnson was, in effect, a bully. Of
course, it was Johnson who dismissed Gulliver’s
Travels by saying, Boswell reports: “When once you have thought of big men
and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.” Some of Wolcot’s verbal
touches are cartoonishly effective – “To crush a butterfly, or brain a gnat” (reminiscent
of Pope’s “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?”) and “Heaven’s awful thunder,
or a rumbling cart!” – though none changes our judgment of Johnson. One line
puzzled me: “To force up one poor nipperkin of water.”

What’s
a “nipperkin?” The previous line offers a clue. “Wheels on wheels” refers to a
water mill moved by a river’s current. The OED
gives us “a small vessel used as a measure for alcoholic liquor, containing a
half-pint or less.” And, metaphorically, “a small quantity of ale, wine,
spirits, etc.” Another source defines a nipperkin as one-eighth of a gill,
with a gill in the U.S. measuring four fluid ounces – hardly enough to slake a
thirst. The dictionary cites Hardy’s “The Man He Killed” (1902):